John Pijanowski, associate professor of educational leadership at the University of Arkansas, is leading an initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation, to teach ethics to undergraduate and graduate students in the sciences.
Rapid sharing of information among scientists has exciting potential for research but it also highlights the need to protect the confidentiality of human subjects and the well-being of endangered species, according to a new paper.
Over time, the esoteric and sometimes downright strange quests of science have proven easy targets for politicians and others looking for perceived examples of waste in government — and a cheap headline.
College biology textbooks cater to the needs of pre-med majors and not those of the majority of students who take introductory science classes, a new study reveals.
Johns Hopkins bioethicist and physician Jeremy Sugarman, MD, MPH, MA, is author of an opinion on the crucial ethical considerations in HIV cure research.
Only 11% of drugs that enter clinical trials ultimately receive regulatory approval. One possible reason is flawed preclinical animal research. A new study led by McGill University researchers identifies key procedures believed to address threats to the validity of preclinical findings.
Increased concerns about the perceived risk of vaccination, inconvenience, or religious tenets are leading more U.S. parents to opt-out of vaccinating their children. Parents are increasingly able to do so in states that have relatively simple procedures for immunization exemption, report researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center in the July issue of Health Affairs. Some states, fearing a public health crisis, have responded by putting in place more burdensome procedures for parents of school-aged children to opt-out.
Do ethicists engage in better moral behavior than other professors? The answer is no. Nor are they more likely than nonethicists to act according to values they espouse.
In this video, researchers describe the value of clinical trials for projects they are working surrounding everything from diabetes and drug addiction to trauma and lung cancer.
There are many myths when it comes to clinical trials. In this video, University of Kentucky researchers and participants dispel those myths to show how valuable clinical trials are to medical advancement.
Little is understood about physicians' views surrounding the ethical aspects of ICD deactivation in end-of-life situations, especially as it relates to other medical interventions and patient and family directives. New research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has revealed that many electrophysiology practitioners believe ICD and pacemaker deactivation to be ethically distinct and that an ICD should not be deactivated without discussion with patients and families, even in the face of medical futility. The study results were reported today at the 2013 American College of Cardiology meeting in San Francisco.
Richard Primack, Boston University professor of biology and editor-in-chief of the journal Biological Conservation, observes in the current issue of that publication that while instances of scientific misconduct in the publication of research findings is a matter of serious concern, such occurrences are extremely rare. Primack shares his views on this matter in an editorial in the current issue of Biological Conservation.
In a study using mathematical axioms, a group of researchers led by Ge Wang, adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at Virginia Tech, has refuted a study that reports on possible racial bias in NIH review process of funding proposals.
Funding agencies may be paying out duplicate grants, according to an analysis completed at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech and led by Harold R. Garner, a professor in the departments of biological science, computer science, and basic science. The study points to the possibility millions of dollars in funding may have been used inappropriately.
Male scientists are far more likely to commit fraud than females and the fraud occurs across the career spectrum, from trainees to senior faculty. The analysis of professional misconduct was co-led by a researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and was published today in the online journal mBio.
The growing trend towards conducting research on youths as they use social networking sites like Facebook raises ethical questions in academia. Guidelines and best practices are lacking.
Judgments we make with a moral underpinning are made more quickly and are more extreme than those same judgments based on practical considerations, a new set of studies finds. However, the findings also show that judgments based on morality can be readily shifted and made with other considerations in mind.
In a commentary to be published in the Dec. 12 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, two Johns Hopkins faculty members predict an ever-diminishing role for government and drug company funding of basic biomedical research and suggest scientists look to “innovative” kinds of private investment for future resources. Current negotiations in Washington over sequestration and the so-called “fiscal cliff” provide an opportunity to fundamentally rethink the funding of biomedical research, they say.
Scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville are using a collaboration portal designed to encourage collaborative “open science” by providing scientists with the capability to easily organize, discover, and share data, tools and information.
As the use of Twitter and other social media by physicians and patients rises, more and more physicians seem to forget to do what many consider crucial for building doctor-patient trust: disclose potential conflicts of interest. However, physicians are not entirely at fault: prominent medical societies have failed to lay out comprehensive guidelines for physicians on when and how to disclose a conflict of interest when utilizing social media.
The tremendous potential public health benefits of research with blood samples left over after routine newborn screening must not be lost amidst controversy and litigation, say medical and bioethics experts in a commentary published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
The most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the world, such as Cell, Nature, Science, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), have less and less influence amongst scientists, according to a paper co-authored by Vincent Larivière, a professor at the University of Montreal’s School of Library and Information Sciences.
Healthcare ethics consultants are called upon in the most difficult of circumstances; where do they turn for advice? The American Society For Bioethics and Humanities’ Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs Committee (CECA) is taking a community approach, creating an online forum for feedback and shared experiences to accompany a paper published in the Fall 2012 issue of the Journal of Clinical Ethics.
The advertising ethicality evaluative map (AEEM), conceived by Lee Ahern of Penn State’s College of Communications, separates individual advertisements on a four-quadrant map to enable people to see which ads may be problematic.
Advances in medicine allow doctors to keep patients alive longer, tackle fertility problems and extend the viability of premature babies. They also lead to a growing number of moral questions for both the medical provider and patient. “Across the country, so-called conscience legislation allows doctors and nurses to refuse to provide abortions, contraception, sterilizations, and end-of-life care,” says Elizabeth Sepper, JD, health law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “But legislators have totally overlooked the consciences of providers who have made the conscientious judgment to deliver care and of the patients who seek these treatments.” She says that laws should negotiate conflict between individual and institutional belief without losing sight of the patient. Sepper will discuss this issue during a 10/26 webcast.
A team of researchers including Arturo Casadevall, M.D., Ph.D., of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, has found that misconduct is responsible for two-thirds of all scientific paper retractions.
Exercising conscience in healthcare is usually defined as refusing to provide contested services, like abortion. But in an article to be published Sept. 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine, a University of Michigan faculty member says doctors can be “conscientious” providers of abortion.
Ethical challenges are central to persistent “critical weaknesses” in the national system for ensuring drug safety, according to a commentary by former Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee members published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The federal government is in the process of revising the regulations that govern most human subject research in the United States. In a “Policy Forum” piece in the Aug. 3 issue of "Science," bioethics expert Rebecca Dresser, JD, the Daniel Noyes Kirby Professor of Law and professor of ethics in medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, weighs in with recommendations for changes in the oversight process.
Researchers from the University of Chicago Medicine argue that parents should be critical stakeholders in the expansion of newborn screening to include lysosomal storage diseases (LSDs).
A $500,000 grant to Saint Louis University’s Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics will fund the first ever remediation program to aid institutions when they discover researchers who have engaged in wrongdoing or unprofessional behavior.
A new University at Buffalo study of publications in the world’s top five general medical journals finds that when clinical trials do not account for participants who dropped out, results are biased and may even lead to incorrect conclusions.
Marcia Boumil of Tufts University School of Medicine examines state laws regulating pharmaceutical gifts to doctors and finds that their constitutionality may be in question in light of a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court case from Vermont concerning data mining.
Seeking ways to change cancer patients’ perceptions and negative attitudes towards clinical trials participation, researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center conducted a study offering two different kinds of intervention to two groups of adults with cancer who had not previously been asked to participate in clinical trials. They found a multimedia psychoeducational intervention to be more effective in changing patients’ perceptions and negative attitudes toward clinical trials than standard educational literature.
According to some estimates, the average corporate email user sends 112 emails every day. About one out of every seven of those messages, says a new study from Georgia Tech, can be called gossip. Assistant Professor Eric Gilbert of the School of Interactive Computing examined hundreds of thousands of emails from the former Enron corporation and found that 14.7 percent of the emails qualify as office scuttlebutt.
A growing concern with fraud and misconduct in published drug studies has led researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Pharmacoeconomic Research to investigate the extent and reasons for retractions in the research.
Johns Hopkins University scholar, lawyer and human rights advocate Leonard Rubenstein is attending the 65th session of the World Health Assembly this week, pushing for a resolution to document attacks on health care workers in conflict zones such as Syria and Bahrain. Recent escalation of such attacks has raised humanitarian concern.
Patients see potential benefits from direct-to-consumer genetic testing, but are also concerned about how test results will be used, and generally are unwilling to pay more than $10 or $20 for them.
The Medical Publishing Insights and Practices (MPIP) initiative and its co-sponsors recently collaborated with journal editors to characterize the persistent and perceived credibility gap in reporting industry-sponsored research and to identify potential approaches to resolve it. This unique round table, hosted by MPIP, reached consensus on Ten Recommendations for Closing the Credibility Gap in Reporting Industry-Sponsored Clinical Research as reported in the May issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
More health researchers are collaborating with community groups. But ethicists write that programs that educate researchers and community groups about research ethics "fail to meet the needs of all groups."